Golden Beads
by Vacancy
Summary: Elizabeth pays her respect for Wills' sacrifice, and Jack, wordlessly joins her in her midnight vigil. Oneshot.


**Ah, the joy of coloring books.**

**Thank you, Meads, for making me pigment that Jack and Liz poster, or else I wouldn't have had this idea.**

Disclaimer: I own nothing but my love of Jack and Liz.

They had formed a bizarre sort of tradition, Elizabeth and Jack.

August the twenty-first . . .

. . . August the twenty-first.

Ten years, exactly, since the day the crew of the _Dutchman_ had pulled Will down, into the tradition of ten years away from land, on the wide-open sea, bringing down ships and collecting souls. Nine years and eleven months, September twenty-first, since Jack had opened the door to the cottage without asking, without announcing his presence in any way, just shrugging off his jacket and sitting next to Elizabeth, before the humble fire.

Like he expected her to understand that he was trying to make up for every damning, selfish, narcissistic thing he'd done by paying this anniversary respect.

Like he expected her to be _understanding_.

She had screamed at him. She had thrown every dirty word she knew into his face, and even thrown things—including the half-full bottle of rum he'd brought as penance for his actions. She had yelled and screamed and stormed about and he had, of course, yelled back, cursed back, and even started to pick up a loaf of bread to pitch back in retaliation, because, well, he wouldn't simply sit there and _take _it. He hadn't meant to fight over what he'd done to Will, the stupid bastard, but she had initiated and naturally he would react.

He ranted about freedom and how he hated the Dutchman and how the crew would make his life hell until she had started forward to yell back and tripped over the leg of a chair. She sat up, the fight out of her, her cheeks red with embarrassment, but a bit too dizzy from hitting her head to stand without making a larger fool out of herself.

But this was when Jack saw something more horrible than anything he could have imagined he might have happened upon in the small cottage, something he hadn't noticed in the flurry of the furious calico skirts that was Elizabeth.

A curved lump on her stomach.

For a moment he tried to convince himself that Liz had been trying to eat her pain away, but her arms were as slim and her waist as slender as ever, length-wise. He was forced to admit it to himself—she was _pregnant_.

This was more than troubling, this was awful. Ugly women, pretty women, rich, poor, married, maidens—as long as they were not of consequence, he could flirt or insult or cheat on at his discretion. Pregnant women were another matter. Another _life_ existed inside them. It was not only the rigid expectation of respect everyone was impressed with, forced to show pregnant women extreme courteousness by the fathers and family members, but a pious belief that they were the most fearful thing in the world that kept Jack from crossing them. With his little experience with impregnated females, he knew they could scream like a hellcat, not pay a tab, insult everyone in town and would feel no repercussions because they were with child.

He had left as soon as he possibly could—the time it took to help Elizabeth to her feet due to said fear and awe, throw on his jacket and sprint down the hill and valley that isolated the cliffside cottage from the ocean.

A year had passed in loneliness and grief, Elizabeth and her cottage and the child growing inside her. When the time came for his delivery, she had already traveled back to Port Royal, where she was shown immense respect and slight admiration for being 'the dead gov'na's brave daughter'.

Eleven twenty-firsts came and went, and as population grew, so did the houses near Elizabeths'. Some of the older residents, frightened of her reclusive behavior and polite rebuffs of friendship, whispered she was a thing to be feared. _A sea-witch_, they said, _do you see the way she watches the waters_?

None built their abodes too near the neat little cottage by the seaside, but a few new wives came to pay a visit, and Elizabeth, however coldly, accepted their invitations for tea or dinner, and once to market. With her baby boy, William, she found that she was forgetting, almost, the curve of Will's cheekbone, the arch of his eyebrow, how handsome he looked when he laughed. And she let herself. And she felt ashamed.

August twenty-first came, at last, a memorial of a lost love. The baby did not wail or wake in the night, as it did most evenings, and Elizabeth sat by the fire, glad, for once in a very long time, that she was alone. She didn't think of him, nor did she wonder what she would say to him when ten years came, and if the anniversary brought him along as well. If he came. If he hadn't found a new love, that of the sea, like Jack had. Too much to stay an honest man for.

And yet he came, like an honest man might, again silently, again without announcing his presence, and this time, there were no words exchanged. The two sat in silence but for the gentle breath of the child and the crackle of the fire and, occasionally, the sound of Jack swilling from his rum bottle. She almost asked for a bit for herself, nearly started humming the song they had sung together around the fire. But she stayed silent, ashamed, not because she had broken what she wanted to have been a night of remembrance, but that she was snapping something which she felt should stay intact.

Elizabeth, no matter how pressed by willpower to stay awake and watch the fire as if Will would come to her through flame and not sea, succumbed to sleep. She had worked hard that day, trying to drown out all thought of him, and sleep was so sparse on her insomnia-pressed nights. Her eyelids drifted shut, and almost in spite of the spirit of the night, she let her head rest on Jacks' shoulder.

When she woke, he was gone, and lemony dawn light spilled through the one window, welcoming the babys' cries and complaints. A new day. The twenty-second. Her head lay pillowed on nothing but the rough-hewn wooden bench where they had sat a few hours previously, but he had obviously tried to slip away without waking her, though from chivalry or fear she couldn't decipher.

She shivered, and it was not from the breeze.

**-x-**

It couldn't have been ten years, not yet.

She couldn't be twenty-eight.

Elizabeth and Jack couldn't have gone through their nightly vigil ten times.

When he pushed open the door, Elizabeth was hunched by the fire, as she had been for ten years on these August twenty-firsts. She had barely aged, and if she had, it had been gracefully. There was no trace of gray in her hair, though being a mother and a wife to an estranged husband and owner of a small substance farm was work much harder than most encountered. There were no lines on her face, and her waist was as slim as before she had little Will. The third. Will III. How odd to think of it that way.

He sat next to her, as usual, though he felt like he was standing before a loaded and cocked gun. He had come in the pre dawn black, to pay his respects at least, before Will had come, so his return wouldn't inflame her hatred of him once more. He had to wonder, had Will already come? Was the _Dutchman_ floating below surface, it's captain ready to meet his beloved, or would the night rounds of the _Dutchman_ keep him until after nightfall?

"It's strange," Elizabeth said, quietly, and Jack started. No words had been uttered since that first visit, and it was a silence they bore together, one of them unaccustomed to solemn quiet, the other close as a lover. She raised her left hand in the flickering firelight, and a ring glittered on a slim, pale finger. "That all these years we were sure that the date was August the twenty-first, and we were _wrong_."

The white gold was set with a black stone, fingers reaching from both sides of the setting, just brushing in the middle, both of them trying to take hold of the onyx he now realized, was the shape of a heart. A real heart, it's veins etched lightly under the lace of thin silver fingers, half-obscured by their clutching desperation.

"Wrong?" he echoed.

"Their calender runs differently," Elizabeth said in hushed tones, tears leaking out of her eyes. "I went to the market to get something nice to have for supper—you know, for _him—_and he came here, and William and I were _gone_—" she held up her hand again. "He thought we'd left, run in fear of him. He left a note and the ring. He said he wouldn't visit again, but he wanted me to have this. He didn't want to upset me." Her voice broke.

She knew, of course, that she was not speaking to the correct sympathetic audience, but no one else would listen. No one else would understand that she couldn't pursue this misconception, and win him back, just to lose him again.

"Thats bad," he offered lamely. He lurched forward and offered the traditional blue bottle. "Rum?"

Elizabeth laughed in a strangled sort of way, and took the bottle from him. She swilled a large mouthful and choked on it slightly, having forgotten the particular taste, but modeled her rusty rum-drinking after Jacks', which was considerably more intimidating

"Wonder Cure," she choked out after a second.

"Of my own creation," he said, and withdrew a bottle from beside the bench and opened it himself as Elizabeth drank a smaller mouthful and cupped her hands around the rum like it was a drink to warm her fingers.

"I miss him," she said, and sank down a little more, resting her elbows on her knees. Jack placed an arm over her shoulders automatically, and Elizabeth leaned over ever so slightly. Maybe it was because she'd gone so long without being touched at all by a human being that this felt so like something wrong to do. "Sorry I killed you, Jack."

"They weren't bluffing about the stench, love," he said, but she didn't seem scorned.

"I'm not sorry," she said helpfully. "About any of it."

"Taking into consideration the acts that preceded said murder I would say that is quite flattering, Miss Swann."

She didn't reply, twisting the ring around and around her finger, like if she corkscrewed it enough it would just go away, taking everything else with it. They sat in silence a while longer, before Jack spoke again.

"Where's Very-Little Will, then, Lizzy?"

"Asleep," she said softly, and swilled again from the rum bottle.

"You'll have a headache in the morning," he said, observing the impressively low levels of alcohol in the bottle.

"Nothing worse than what I have now," she said hoarsely, and took another drink like she was trying to mock him.

"He won't have the chance come back until you're ten years older."

"I know."

"He most likely won't even then."

"I know."

"Will you marry again?"

Elizabeth paused, not expecting this sort of question. After a beat, she replied with a decisive

"No."

"You know, Elizabeth, being a ship captain . . . I can preform a marri-age ceremony. Right here. On this . . . floor."

Elizabeth found this repeat of a past conversation funny in the most perverse kind of way. She giggled in a watery sort of fashion, then hiccuped.

"Will you ever grow up, Jack?"

"What?" he asked, wounded.

"Honestly. You're still such a child. You think love is someone being pretty enough, so you love it, or the ocean being wide enough to accommodate you, so you love it. You love things for how they look and how they feel, and how they bend to you, not because of any real traits of theirs."

"Not true," he said, feeling the rum he'd had take hold. "The sea feels very real to me, love. As do you."

"Me and a score of other floozies," she said scornfully, but couldn't help but feel flattered. In some ways, the giggling, flirtatious governers' daughter had still not fully drained out of her, not in these long twelve years. Jack was a handsome man, and maybe, in another life, an alluring one, but now she saw him as nothing more than a crafty child, shouting lies and stealing what he wanted so he could live the life he wanted and rob others of their own. He didn't deem her response worth any words of his, so she contributed "I always wanted to be a pirate when I was a girl, you know."

"A pirate?" he asked her, looking not at all surprised. "That doesn't alarm me, Miss Swann, though what _does_ is that you are currently living in the middle of all-bloody nowhere with your son, making a living by _farming _and waiting for a man who'll never come back."

"I suppose that is a little uncharacteristic of me," she said evenly. "But people change with time, and time changes people."

Jack, though thoroughly lost by her statement, sighed in an understanding way.

"I suppose it was against you from the start," he said, feeling less tipsy by the second and not enjoying it at all.

"It was a good fight," Elizabeth said in a sort of parry. "I suppose love is just not to be for me."

"And the going was so good at the start," Jack said sympathetically. "You had Will and Norrington at your beck and call, not to mention most of the _Pearl_s' crew."

"I do miss it, in a way," she said, twisting the ring again. She looked up at Jack for the first time and was surprised that he didn't look drunk at all, a state in which it was hard to find Jack Sparrow.

"The _Pearl _or the men?" he drawled. "Because the _Pearl _is just beyond the valley, and men," he squeezed her shoulder lightly. "They never left."

"I suppose," she conceded, looking a little pink from the route their conversation was taking. Dawn light trickled through the windows, ready to unleash a fiery heat that had been plaguing even the cool house in the shade of a Caribbean copse of trees.

Then she realized something.

"Your hair . . ." she said, reaching up to touch the beads that usually adorned his hair. Beside of the motley crew of painted wooden beads that made him so carelessly handsome, it was a pattern of red and gold, red and gold. "They're very nice." She leaned forward to inspect one of them, and liked them a little more when she saw the gold was etched with red, making beautiful, intricate patterns on the surface. "Who did you steal these from, I won—."

She had lived this before, though only once. Her state of hysterical fear and all the thoughts that she kept so cleverly hidden in her head fluttering about, squawking at each other, panicking her, the feeling of dizzy betrayal and she, so reluctant, and his lips so insistent on hers.

She felt his sword dig into her hip where she had fallen back onto the bench in shock, and the many layers of cloth that obscured his tan skin from the hot sun, and her little shoe was on his cracked old boot—

"Jack," she said, when they were sitting a safe three inches apart and no appendage was touching. "That was not 'the opportune moment."

"I would argue that it is."

"I would slap you."

Silence. Awkward silence. She raised the bottle again, realizing she was not drinking late at night but far too early in the morning.

"Oh," she spoke into the silence, disappointed. "The rum is gone."

**The end is very run-of-the-mill, but you'll get over it someday with some therapy.**

**Anyway, I heard that there were two possibilities, both promoted by POTC: **

**A) Will is trapped forever on the Dutchman only allowed to disembark once every ten years or**

**B) Because Elizabeth stayed true to him he is released from the Dutchman after only ten years.**

**I'm going with A here, because seriously. If you ferry spirits from living to death, you don't just get to say 'See Ya, I'm off to make a living building birdhouses!' after a decade.**

**-scoffs-**

**Love,**

**Vacancy**


End file.
